Holding Enemy Portal Gives HUGE XP and Gold

There is something I would like to clear up - at some point before release the developers mentioned in passing that there was a direct benefit to to holding an enemy portal, either in experience or in gold or in both. No one official has mentioned it since then though, so it might not have made it into the release version.

Can someone test this? (if no one gets to it I will try it Friday night)

The easiest way to test is probably to get a 1v1 on Crucible and have one player control both gold mines while the other blinks over to cap the opp portal and then sits off to one side to catalog any xp or gold income produced.

If the benefit is great enough then it might outweigh the lost grunt stream, and the strategic implications either way are worth sussing out

Edit: see comments below - holding enemy portals gives each player on your team FULL gold and xp for every wave spawned form that portal while you hold it. Therefore capping portals early is incredibly beneficial.

This is in the instruction manual (that you get 2 expierence for every creep that leaves your portals). However, I have yet to see this as true, I would need to look in the LUA for it (and I plan to, sometime).

"Page 10: Whether the reinforcements that emerge from a portal are your allies or not depends on who controls the portal. If you capture an enemy portal, you gain not just a strategic advantage on your opponent but an experience advantage while it is under your control. Your team will receive experience each time a unit appears through the portal."

I'll investigate the LUA for you sometime and try to give you an answer. Hopefully I'll also be able to find out of currency procs off of each gold mine, though I don't think that it does.

I know you get xp from holding an enemy portal. The problem is, it still doesn't math in your favor. Basically, your team gets the same xp they would have gotten from killing the troops, but so does the opponent. Basically means you get 2 portals worth of XP, and your opponents get 3 portals worth. Not quite as bad as 3 ports to 1, but still obviously slower xp than otherwise.

1. Everyone is saying that you get as much XP from capping a portal as you do by killing the portal wave. Does this scale? What I mean is, if they have gaints / cata and you cap it, do you get the same xp as killing a wave full of giants / cata? Or do you just get standard wave XP amount?

2. You get xp for capping a portal. But a wave can be killed by 1 player alone, or the entire team together. Is the xp from a cap portal split 3 ways automatically, or does it go to the person who capped it? Also, if an allie is dead, and you have a capped wave, is it split 2 ways, or still split 3 ways and one split is technically wasted.

3. By capping a portal you can get xp. But, by killing grunts you can get XP and gold. If question #1 answer is that XP scales, then what would be the most efficient creep wave level to cap at for xp gain / gold loss ratio? Of course, at level 10 with giants cata capping is not a question, it wins games, so gold / xp is irrelevant if you can turn the tide of battle and win with a portal cap.

Theory:

Also, what is more important early game? XP or Gold? I go with gold, there's a bunch of ways to get xp, and a bunch of ways to get gold. Thing is, the more gold you have, the better chance you can get items / cit upgrades etc. that can increase your chances of accumulating more xp, but no matter how much XP you have, your gold rate is the same - unless you XP gives you a level up and you pick an ability that helps you accumulate xp via creeping with aoe etc. - except that will cost mana in most cases - and mana early game is hard to come by because you don't have proper helms - and helms cost gold

Gold: 1. accumulate gold as gold mines "tick" increase by capping their gold mine flag / buying currency 1 (xp + gold) 2. Get a kill / assist on enemy dg (gold - I can't believe after all the games i've played that im not postiive if you get xp as well haha, inform me? i'm pretty sure it does but im not sure how much as I've leveled up after killing people) 3. Kill creep wave (gold + xp)

One last thing to consider:

If you cap a portal flag early, you still get xp, but you also give the enemy the ability to get XP when they recap it, whereas if the portal was never capped, then that's one less flag for them to get XP from capping themselves. Also, in most cases 2 players are going to be sharing a creep wave at one point or another. by capping a portal flag early in a 3v3 1 enemy can be in each lane, getting a full creep wave worth of xp (even if they are near a tower and can't actually control the lane itself) while 1 enemy recaps the portal and gets to kill an entire creep wave for gold + xp + xp for recapping his own portal. Meanwhile your team is sharing 1 portal wave worth of creep xp / gold.

Even without looking at the exact numbers, there's a high probability that capping a portal early is not beneficial. Unless the numbers (that we curently don't know) can cover for all of the disadvantages of doing so.

I remember a game in the 1.0 days where someone rushed our portal on cat and captured it. The idea was that we would eny them creep exp, because they woudlnt be able to level.

If i remember it was pretty balanced, not many kills etc, but somehow they were a few levels ahead of us midgame (say level 10-11 vs level 7-8), without getting anything exp, when they should have been the opposite.

So I think it might, but killing the creep waves probably gives more to the opposition. Would be intteresting on non-cat maps.

FULL value? Oh that changes everything. That means in 3v3, a captured portal is 3 TIMES as valuable. On average, each hero gets 2/3 of a portals worth of xp, optimally. With this, you'd actually be getting 1 and 1/3, where a full 1 of that is automatic.

And the gold production of that portal.. wow. It is like everyone on your team tagging every creep that spawns... how hard is that normally?

According to the RULES (I have yet to find an entry in the LUA for this) you gain X amount of expierence per creep generated from an enemy's portal. While screwing around in Single Player it looked like 2 expierence per creep, but it's hard to say.

This is on top of the XP gained by capping the flag. This is like, after you walk away. And this is your whole team, regardless of where you are on the map (unless you are dead).

According to the RULES (I have yet to find an entry in the LUA for this) you gain X amount of expierence per creep generated from an enemy's portal. While screwing around in Single Player it looked like 2 expierence per creep, but it's hard to say.

so what happens on leviathan and others with neutral flags at the start? does this mean its more beneficial to wait for the other team to cap it first?

No, any portal that spawns Creeps gives XP to the side that controls it - it sort of minimises the XP difference between yourself and your enemey that's generated when your opponents kill your Creeps. There is a large difference between the XP earnt from spawning Creeps and killing them, though.

In terms of whether or not to cap your opponents portals is worth the decrease in XP available to your side due to the decreased number of Creeps available to be killed, usually by the time you're able to capture of the initially opponent controlled Portals you're able to push back your enemy, and don't require the additional XP. In terms of whether it's worth capturing Neutral flags, however, I believe it's still situational. Are you actually going to be able to kill the oppositions creeps that spawn from those portals, or will your attention be directed elsewhere?

Side portals and own side's portals doesn't generate xp or gold if I read correctly. edit: typos

I'm not sure where you're reading this, however if you watch your XP bar when any portal you control spawns creeps, you see the numbers increase. The more protals your control, the more it increases. Unless I'm horribly, horribly mistaken?

I'm not sure where you're reading this, however if you watch your XP bar when any portal you control spawns creeps, you see the numbers increase. The more protals your control, the more it increases. Unless I'm horribly, horribly mistaken?

Start a single player, set options to fast spawn or something. Don't go near lanes or flag and wait a while to see you don't get xp from own creeps.

From looking at the lua file (lua/sim/Conquest.lua) you get gold and xp for all creeps that was going to spawn from captured portals. Full value is awarded to all demigods in your team.

If true then this demolishes common wisdom that you shouldn't take enemy portals early, no?

In fact you should take and hold enemy portals as early and often as possible, and the larger the map the more you want to do this.

Gunblob (or anyone) can we get a copy/paste of the LUA script which indicates this in the comments? I would like to see the specific numbers before making conclusions, and even then it would be nice to run some ingame tests to make sure it's working the way it should...

As far as getting xp from owned portals - I have respawned after dying and dinged a level without leaving the base - gaining xp from the friendly grunts coming through would make sense, but there could be other factors - can we dig into this a bit further?

Thanks for your help on this stuff - I'd hate to think we've all been playing with a common-sense strategy which is completely wrong

When we have clear numbers I will change the title of the post accordingly and put some karma out there...

# Give gold/experience to owning team if portal has been captured # This is to compensate for not being able to kill the grunts if(portal.InitialOwner and sTable.AIBrain.Conquest.TeamArmy and portal.InitialOwner != sTable.AIBrain.Conquest.TeamArmy) then local initialOwnerSpawnIndex = warRank

local experience = 0 local expMult = GameData.PortalExpMult or 1 local gold = 0 local goldMult = GameData.PortalGoldMult or 1

local initialOwnerBrain for k, v in ArmyBrains do if(v.Conquest.IsTeamArmy and v.Conquest.TeamArmy == portal.InitialOwner) then initialOwnerBrain = v end end

for k, v in ArmyBrains do if(not v.Conquest.IsTeamArmy and not v.Conquest.IsNeutralArmy and v.Conquest.TeamArmy == sTable.AIBrain.Conquest.TeamArmy) then if(v.Hero and not v.Hero:IsDead()) then v.Hero:GainExperience(experience) v:GiveResource('Gold', gold, 'Bounty') #LOG('Giving ' .. experience .. ' experience to ' .. v.Name) #LOG('Giving ' .. gold .. ' gold to ' .. v.Name) end end end end

---

Translation:

If you own a portal that did not start as your own (NEUTRAL_CIVILIAN portals still generate expierence + GOLD it looks like) then your entire team gets XP and Gold from that. I will be updating this post as I investigate further.

Just did a single player test.. creeps coming out of your own portal provide 0 xp. Your gold mines generate 2g per tick each, since there are 3 (2 portal flags, 1 gold flag), you get 6g a tick. When you cap an enemy portal flag, you get that 2g per tick (not always at the same time as your own gold mines as you controlled it at a different time), and every time creeps come out of that portal you get 231 xp for original creep wave (with archers) (no additional for priests / angels / cats / giants). However, you don't get this the first time creeps spawn out of the portal.

Usually when my team can clear out the 3 towers on the gold flag side and generally get their portal, I like to control it and buy priests. The testing I did pretty much confirms this.. although I usually bought priests so that they would whittle away at the towers near their citadel faster rather than the added xp.

I think it is highly valuable to control portal flag if there are no towers left to harm you getting it or getting out (or having an opponent teleport to those towers and box you in). Your whole team gets 231 xp each (tested with multiple ppl on team) from teh creep spawn, the creeps don't hinder your tower destruction in the middle (on the side your creeps are now coming out), and it provides the same gold as the gold flag.

Note: Also did Levi testing. Neutral portals give you nothing but creep flow and warscore. No xp. You still get the 231 xp from the actual enemy portals tho (no gold because no gold mines attached to those portals in levi).

More notes: One wave of creeps (with archers) provides 231 xp whether you help to kill it or just sit there and have them die to a tower or to your creeps. Sharing a lane divies up that xp between the 2 or 3 of you, yet holding an enemy portal gives 231 xp to ALL of you. Basically, every time a friendly creep wave spawns from an enemy portal, it's like every person on your team just killed a creep wave alone.

I tested on UB, and if I spec'd post mortem and exploded the creep wave, I got < 231 xp due to the explosion (generally between 131 to 198 xp instead of 231 xp). Crazy. Surge of faith provides the full 231, Hammer slam provides the full 231, Heaven's Wrath provides the full 231, Reg mines provide the full 231.

POST MORTEM IS BULLSHIT!

(I don't have a replay of any of this.. but if you disagree with anything I posted I can easily recreate the event and capture a replay )

They have a lead in war score early game, but when you can wipe out their entire team effortlessly I can guarantee you they will not get past war score 7.

I've never seen this work on Leviathan. If you let the other team have a portal for half of the game, it takes a very long time to make that up in war score, especially since cap locks start coming out in full force during the endgame.

It's not just the fact that the other team has one more portal flag captured. It's the fact that everywhere else on the maps is a 4 vs 3 contest, since you've taken yourself out of most battles by farming a neutral portal. This makes your team more killable. The entire time you are farming xp, your opponents should have all 4 middle flags, because you've effectively taken yourself out of the fight. If the other team isn't holding all middle flags and tearing up your towers, they are doing something wrong. Towers are very precious on Leviathan, becuase they are so spread out. Losing them means your team has nowhere to fall back to and nowhere to teleport to. If you play on High Tower settings, your strategy might work, but I rarely have played a game that has it.